For over 10,000 years, in the Pacific Northwest of America, in the eastern Plateau area, there lived several indigenous peoples, including the Salish-speaking Spokan Indians. Having successfully adapted to their environment, their settlements and culture flourished long before Euro-American contact and the deculturation that followed. Relatively little information of their way of life has been available - scattered among the accounts of early traders, trappers, and missionaries, as well as in the unpublished field notes of researchers... until now.

John A. Ross, an Emeritus Professor of Eastern Washington University, devoted four decades to learning the Spokan culture, through firsthand ethnohistorical and archaeological research, but even more so by interviewing Spokan elders who remembered the old ways and entrusted that knowledge to him, that it could be passed on to future generations.

This book, his magnum opus, is the culmination of all that research and gathered wisdom. A decade in the making, it is the definitive ethnography of a fascinating people who wisely crafted a way of life that was both sustainable and culturally rich.